[rescue] RE: divide and conquer? (CPU design)

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:

>On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:

>> Real gains in speed are achieved by proximity, and dividing a CPU into 
>> multiple pieces of silicon (or whatever) will have a negative effect.

>I beleive that he was trying to say that it should be 8 CPUs on the same
>die, as opposed to one CPU with 8 execution units.

Yeah.

>I think that is a nifty idea, but I wonder how that performance would
>compare to a VLIW design.  The IA-64 sorta does this, but only for a
>maximum of 4 instructions per bundle, and 4 is what you get when you are
>lucky.  I don't trust anything Intel does as being a good example of a
>design strategy generally.  

I'm a huge fan of VLIW (real VLIW, not EPIC), but I think for overall
*system* performance, my idea would keep more instruction units busy
than VLIW.

Of course there's also a huge market for all-out single processor
performance, and I keep hoping someone will come forward with a clean
VLIW design and see how it does, but alas....

-- david fischer -- dave at cca.org -- www.cca.org -- Cthulhu told me to. --